It was green, on purpose I'm sure. Vegetable soup but with no vegetables, just this green water with specks of something or nother that I caught as it dripped purposefully and repeatedly out of the spoon of the young man before me. I ate it anyways, as the chef piled a concoction of rice onto my plate, delaying consumption perfectly with a story. I told the young man that all the guitar kids in the States love Dave Matthews Band and can play at least one cover. I had heard him earlier in the afternoon playing his guitar above me. I poked my head out onto the patio because I thought it was the noisy neighbors in the next building whose kids run around aimlessly and scream in a foreign baby jibber. I thought that it would be redeeming if it were them playing the pleasant music at dusk, but when I looked to the streets it was silent. When I came by my downstairs neighbors' appartment, the young man turned up his music so that no one could hear that it was he who actually played and not the record. He was fascinated with the story but regaurded me cautiously as I scraped off something pink that pre-existed on the spoon that the chef just handed me. He swirled his spoon in the green.
"The music in France is just not so good," he said, snobbishly but longingly. The chef joined us.
"You're eating like a slowpoke! Eat faster? Is it not good?" She said.
The young man politely picked up his bowel and drank the green tasteless mixture and I did the same, glad to not have to use the spoon again.